Robert Fisk: Claims of student massacre spread

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Claims of student massacre spread

By Robert Fisk

Tuesday, 16 June 2009

Tehran University looked as calm as any summer campus. So much for the latest rumours of a bloodbath. Another piece of Iranian fiction, served up on YouTube. Scarved female students were moving through the university's great black iron gates. I asked my driver, Ali, to drop me off at the corner so I could prowl the college bookshops on Engelob Street, I was looking for a volume of modern Persian poetry for a friend. I did not at first hear the man at the cash desk, motioning out the door.

I peered out. The gates of the university were now shut. Behind them was a crowd of hundreds of young men and women, many wearing scarves over their mouths. I crossed the road. And the banners behind those forbidding gates told a frightening story. "Today is a day of mourning," one of them read. "Dignified students are mourners today." "Police, shame on you, shame on you." "Tell my mother – she doesn't have a son any more."

I walked up to the gate. Young female students were crying. So were some of the young men. "We don't want a government by coup," another poster read. "Tehran University dormitory has been coloured with students' blood," another said.

It was difficult to hear over the cries and screaming. But a student began shouting at me in English through those grim black gates. "There was a massacre," he bellowed. "The Basiji and the police came into our student dorms. It all started after the violence last Saturday. The people in the street had been throwing stones, so many of us fled from the campus to our homes. We came back yesterday and it seemed quiet. Then all these armed men burst into the dorms, shooting."

One girl spoke of five dead, another of seven. A student suggested the dead men were not students. Were they hiding on campus? It wasn't clear. Within hours, photographs of blood appeared on the internet. Who were these mysterious victims – for dead men there surely were. The crowds began to run in panic and behind them I spotted the familiar glint of steel helmets. I've now learned how to deal with these gentlemen. You never, ever run. You saunter towards them and if a single one moves his baton towards you, you click your finger so that he thinks that you have a right to be there. Then you stand just behind them, nodding in a friendly way when they look at you.

One of the cops turned round with a cynical smile. "Welcome to our country," he said. A couple of officers waved me away but I waved back my press card and they lost interest.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/claims-of-student-massacre-spread-1706011.html

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